It is with great sadness that we pass on the news that veteran Infopeople instructor Joe Barker passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly last night. At this time, we have no details in regard to cause, arrangements for memorial service, etc. As soon as we know any more, we will post another message.

Until June 2007, Joe was a full-time reference and instruction librarian at the Doe Library and Moffit Undergraduate Library at UC Berkeley. He held an MLIS from Berkeley and a PhD in French Literature from Emory University. He was a third generation California native who grew up in the foothills between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

From 2000 through 2009, Joe taught 135 classes for Infopeople, mostly on web searching, with an emphasis on answering reference questions. The specific titles included PowerSearch, State of the Art Web Searching, Extreme Googling, Making the Most of the Post-Google Web, and Web 2.0: Searching Innovations.

Joe had a unique awareness of what library staff and librarians need to know to step into the post-Google future that now includes the world of blogs and the convenience of RSS feeds. His latest class, Advanced Web Search Tools and Tricks for 2009, was designed to capture ways to explore, use, and find quality information and track trends in web searching. The class was scheduled to start tomorrow, April 7.

Joe will be greatly missed here at Infopeople. If you would like to share a memory or thought of or about Joe, please use the comments section of this blog entry. We will be sure they get passed along to his partner.